This year, I think it is time to take stock of the emergence of technology as a specialty topic of education law. And, I'm happy to report, that our group of legal scholars is recognizing the importance of addressing how technology is driving legal challenges. Not only are there more sessions at ELA addressing technological challenges, but the attendance at those sessions is increasingly very high. The session I attended this morning was standing room only with about40 people listening in.
ELA Technology Presentations 2004-2010To get a sense of the rise of the rise of this specialty topic, I took a quick look at the past seven ELA conferences and counted all the sessions addressing technology. The results are in the chart. As you can see, there is a very positive trend toward more presentations addressing these issues. That makes me so happy. The nation's legal scholars are recognizing the importance of this digital transition.
But, let me present the next challenge to our nation's legal scholars. While the quantity of the presentations (and papers) are going up, the content seems to be stuck on just a few legal topics. In particular, the issues of student speech and cyberbullying seem to be the dominate areas of research for our scholars (including myself). This is understandable as these areas have established caselaw (in the case of expression) or similar statutes across many states (in the case of bullying). These laws serve as a ready research base from which scholars can write up their methodology sections. Fair enough. These are important topics and I love that scholars are considering them at ever deepening levels. I just sat in a session on Cyberbullying that really got at some of the root issues, which I really enjoyed.
But, of course, I want to push a bit further. While student expression and cyberbullying are relevant topics, neither expand the law all the much. Expression law is largely unchanged for 20 years and all those new anti-bullying statutes (including cyber-bullying statutes) don't really do all that much. But, on the other hand, there are many technology driven legal issues that are fundamentally challenging how schools operate - for nearly every child in America. For instance, how schools contract with providers like Google and Apple and others, is fundamentally changing educational contract law. And, in those places where it is not changing, students in those states and districts are falling dangerously behind their peers in other places. This type of legal issue is the critical legal issues that must be addressed in near real time - rather than on the decade-long caselaw development cycle or the multi-year statute development cycle.
How do we address this type of challenge? How do we get yearly presentations at ELA that are 6 months ahead of the school and state policy cycle? This is our challenge. This is ELA's challenge. Technology is driving policy development and deployment faster and faster. In order to properly serve our children, schools must keep pace. Policies must be changed. But if we as a scholarly community cannot keep pace or speak to these issues, we leave school and state officials without a scholarly base on which to draw. We have failed in our duty to be at their side, or at least in their file folders, through these extremely difficult issues.